The Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University has launched a new PhD position aimed at improving understanding of paper mills and addressing systematic manipulation in academic publishing. The project is being developed in partnership with the University of Sheffield and is supported by Wiley, one of the world’s largest academic publishers, as part of its broader commitment to research integrity.
The doctoral research will be jointly supervised by faculty from Leiden and Sheffield and will focus on the structural and cultural factors that allow paper mills to persist. The project seeks to examine the scale, operations, and underlying incentives that facilitate these practices, contributing to a deeper conceptual and empirical understanding of this issue within the research ecosystem.
Outputs from the project are expected to generate new insights that inform scholarly publishing processes, influence research evaluation criteria, and support the development of policies designed to uphold academic integrity. In particular, the work will explore intervention strategies and provide recommendations that can be applied directly to editorial workflows and institutional research governance.
Despite growing awareness of the risks posed by paper mills, limited formal research has been conducted to investigate the conditions under which they operate. This project responds to recent calls across the academic community for more rigorous, evidence-based approaches to combating systematic manipulation.
The CWTS research team emphasized the need for methodological innovation and cross-disciplinary analysis to unpack the embedding of paper mills in diverse research environments. The project is intended to align with wider initiatives in the field of meta-research, including prior work conducted through the Research on Research Institute (RoRI), a collaborative effort among funders and institutions focused on improving the research system.
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